Sustainable Phosphorus Alliance

Sustainable Phosphorus Alliance

Our Vision

We envision a food system that manages phosphorus more sustainably to provide abundant, nutritious food while protecting the health of rivers, lakes, and oceans.

Allies Addressing a Complex Problem

We recycle only a small fraction of the phosphorus we use, nearly all as unprocessed manures whose over-application pollutes our waterways. The Sustainable Phosphorus Alliance is a nonprofit organization driven to innovate and implement solutions to the phosphorus challenge.

Our mission is to be North America’s central forum and advocate for the sustainable use, recovery, and recycling of phosphorus in the food system.

Your Life Depends on It

There is no life without phosphorus. It’s in your bones. It’s in your DNA. As a key fertilizer ingredient, phosphorus is essential for global food security.

As a burgeoning world population harvests more crops for food, energy, and materials, the demand for phosphorus increases. Yet our phosphate rock reserves are non-renewable, increasingly contaminated, and highly concentrated geographically, posing geopolitical vulnerability. Meanwhile, intensified phosphorus use has degraded water quality in rivers, lakes, and coastal oceans, creating toxic algal blooms and dead zones. Our global water security also depends on better phosphorus management.